There is nowhere like it on Earth. And perhaps it isn’t Earth
anyway, this place, this Venice.
It certainly isn’t just elemental earth. It’s water too, and fire – those
sunsets – and air – that celestial blue sky. If you’re feeling metaphysical
at Venice you
also sense Heaven, Hell, Purgatory. (For more on those, read below on the
Chinese competition standout BEHEMOTH).

Nothing is ordinary here. For openers there were spectacle, drama
and high emotion in EVEREST 3D.The
first night glitterati – those Gucci-swathed masses yearning to free their
imaginations – could gaze up from a low-lying Adriatic sandspit
at people doing heroics at Earth’s highest point. It was like GRAVITY
(another recent Venice
opener) without spacesuits – but with that film’s director Alfonso Cuaron, by kismet, looking on. He was this year’s jury
president.

Snowstorms; avalanches; sense-socking camerawork. The truth-based
story of guides and climbers caught in the mother of blizzards on the
grandmother of mountains had a starry cast looking for gale-ful employment. Jake Gyllenhaal; Josh Brolin; Jason
Clarke; John Hawkes. (To audition, your first name had to start with J).
William GLADIATOR Nicholson and Simon FULL MONTY Beaufoy’s
script doesn’t always reach the location’s bracing heights. But visually you
never felt so smack-damn in the snack basket of Mama Nature, waiting to be
gnawed or gobbled by whatever weather whims she unleashes. The chopper work
alone, with the Dolomites sometimes standing in for Nepal, is a
giddying marvel.

Another location for the un-squeamish this year was Boston, USA.
Soon after feeling we’d covered the true-scandal waterfront with SPOTLIGHT –
re-enacting the Boston Globe’s investigation and exposure of child abuse by
Catholic priests in the 1990s – we were dragged back to the wharves of
iniquity by BLACK MASS. A semi-defoliated Johnny Depp, Samurai-bald of pate,
plucked-thin of eyebrow, above pale contact lenses (or did CGI give him those
creepy-limpid snake eyes?), plays gangster Whitey Bulger. Bulger terrorised Tea Party Town, Massachusetts,
with turf wars and murders. To his peers, though, his biggest crime was
turning Fed informant, which didn’t save him from two consecutive life raps
when justice finally felt his collar.

Casts to dream of don’t make either film a sognod’oro. BLACK MASS is a noir-licked limpalong energised mainly by Aussie actor Joel Edgerton.
He does a Boston
twang as Whitey’s FBI minder turned fellow murderer. (40 years was his penal
payback). The better SPOTLIGHT, written and directed by Tom McCarthy (THE
STATION AGENT), is a conventional but pacey tale of snooping turned to
scooping in the fourth estate. Helping to clean the Catholic Church’s Augean
stables – “aw-gee!” as in the collective exclamation as the extent of the
molestation cases became clear – are newsmen Mark Ruffalo,
Michael Keaton and Liev Schreiber. For lovers of
“It can only happen in the Holy Papal Empire” stories: the cardinal found to
have left offender-priests unpunished, merely shuffling them around parishes,
was extracted from Boston to be installed in a
higher diocese in Rome.

Film festivals often behave like Noah’s Ark. The creatures – or in this case
features – march in two by two. After the brace of Boston flicks came a Russian documentary
double about revolutionary upheaval. EvgenyAfineevsky’s WINTER ON FIRE is a history-in-ferment
humdinger from a director whose only previous career standout was a weirdly
cast English-speaking CRIME AND PUNISHMENT (Vanessa Redgrave, Crispin
Glover). His account of the 2013/14 Kiev
uprising is stunning. Filmed footage, found footage, news footage and new
footage – interviews with survivors, including a 12-year-old boy of
Dickens-worthy urchin characterfulness who became a
folkhero of the fight – weave an explosive tapestry
of destiny and popular defiance…..

Russia also chipped in with a critics’ favourite in the
competition. You could call FRANCOFONIA a second ‘war documentary.’ AleksandrSokurov won the 2011
Venice Golden Lion with FAUST, but we’re a long way here from Goethe, Marlowe
or fancy-dress morality drama. Or are we? It’s 1940. The Nazis are invading Paris (they wear grey,
the vanquished wear blue); an archive-film Adolf Hitler, joke-dubbed, asks
“Where is the Louvre?”; and soon, like Faust and Mephistopheles, the French Louvre
curator M. Jaujard (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing)
and the German culture-and-museums overseer Count Wolff Metternich (Benjamin Utzerath) are making a pact involving souls and riches.
The soul of a nation (La France);
the riches of its art treasures

That’s just one layer. Sokurov himself
mediates Prospero-like in a darkened study, narrating the soundtrack while magicking forth the movies-within-movie, which also
include stormy-symbolic scenes of a ship bearing undefined museum treasures
into the squalls of, let’s say, oceanic history. FRANCOFONIA carries its
complexity lightly. It’s impish, antic and all over the place: exactly like a
vessel tipping this way, that way, on a high sea. But the destination remains
clear; the beckoning beacon is bright. Good and heroic deeds – like the
preservation of France’s
art and museum heritage – can happen within vile and unforgivable conflicts.
Maybe next time Sokurov will give us the good news
contained within the sacking and overrunning of eastern Ukraine by
his current leader.

FRANCOFONIA was an early critics’ favourite and was soon joined by
another. Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s ANOMALISA – that’s that Kaufman
who wrote BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND – is
an edgy comedy-noir with a hint of futurism and more than a hint of, ahem,
adult content. There’s a sex scene in a Cincinnati
hotel room: pretty full-blown stuff between the hero, an English customer
services guru, and his one-night cocktail lounge conquest.

Here’s the difference: they’re stop-motion puppets. ANOMALISA is
an anime with a joy in its own aberrant form and format. Best in fest for me;
which is why you can find a fuller discussion in an adjoining feature.

Journey
Into Fear

Venice goers also took a mighty shine to Pablo Trapero’s
EL CLAN from Argentina:
a coruscating thriller-drama from the maker of LION’S DEN and CARANCHO. The Puccio family really did – in the country’s dark,
disoriented years following its military dictatorship – kidnap people and
then, after weeks or months of fruitless (for the unsuspecting families)
negotiation, slay them: coldly, brutally, regardlessly.
Often after the ransoms were paid.

The film exerts its power like a torturer’s third-degree light. We
hardly dare to look – or we squint and wince as we do – as the hostages-to-be
are seized in daylight, by street muggings or car-jackings,
then penned and chained in bathrooms or basements. We hardly dare to listen
as the screams or whimpers drift up to the family living and eating areas,
though the radio or TV is often on (self-protectively) to drown the noises.

The prince of evil, purified of all squeamishness, dapper with
obscene purpose, is Pa Puccio. Guillermo Francella, famed in Argentina as a comedian, plays
him with an opaque yet sheeny menace: a snake that hypnotises its victims
before striking. The family finally went to jail. The film’s last captions
list their sentences. But the discomforts have dug too deep, in us
spectators, for that to end or ease the nightmare in our heads that Trapero has created.

A South American film has never won the Venice Golden Lion. So
another cinematic impudence arrived in form of Venezuela’s DESDE ALLA (FROM
AFAR). Safe from award-winning, Lorenzo Vigas’s
first film, co-scripted with top-peso scenarist Guillermo
Arriaga (21 GRAMS, BABEL, THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA), could
unzip its transgressive plot about a gay fiftysomething.
Played by Chile’s
Alfredo Castro, the lizard-handsome greyhead woos a hunky youth-for-rent
(Luis Silva). The twist is: Castro doesn’t woo that much – he prefers the
voyeur distance implied in the film’s title – and is discomfited, big time,
when the straight street boy starts caring for him back.

The last scene packs a punch that will knock you on the canvas.
Before that, this prizefight is involving if not
outstanding. Ordinary direction; teledrama
production values. It’s the payoff and performances power the picture.

Talking transgression, there’s nothing new under the sun and we
soon had a veteran to prove it. Filmmaker Brian De Palma swaggered into Venice to collect an
award and grace with his attendance a tribute documentary. He’s now a
plumped-out retiree. That dark Bacchus of the art-pop thriller – of Hollywood fables fermented with the forbidden – is now
sporting the start of a Silenus belly. Give him a mini-toga and he could be
refugee from a Titian painting. So could his best movies. Is there anything
more voluptuously crafted, more timelessly sumptuous, than a classic De Palma
sequence?

In Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s DE
PALMA the director natters volubly and compellingly about each film in turn,
from THE WEDDING PARTY to REDACTED. In between the anecdotes and apercus, the
films themselves hiccup their haiku splendours or purl their plan-sequence virtuosity in “remember
how good this was?” excerpts.

As if the footnotes or front-notes to De Palma’s career weren’t
enough – he discovered Robert De Niro, he roused
Pauline Kael to her greatest prose, he was the poet and modern pioneer of the
split screen – he used the camera’s secret energy and the screen space’s
potentiating beauty with a sustained inventiveness we’ve hardly seen since
Eisenstein. By whom, of course, he was inspired to his best of all sequences
(think some): the Odessa Steps baby-in-pram set-piece, with ambient gun
battle, in the Grand Central Station scene of THE UNTOUCHABLES.

Touch
of Evil

Venice is cracking on confidently, even though some doom-chanters
say the end is nigh and the Mostra is in sunset
years. To which the proper response is: Sunset years? What’s wrong with that?
Have you seen a Venetian sunset?
Hardly something to complain about. It looks glorious, lasts a fair while,
and doesn’t accede to darkness for long before the next aesthetic show-stopper,
a Venice
sunrise.

Fest boss Alberto Barbera still delivers
the filmic goods. And the stars. Johnny Depp was king of the Adriatic in week one. The 52-year-old hearththrob was practically torn apart by fans (a rite of
celebratory regicide) as he risked a session of autograph-signing on the
red-carpet night of BLACK MASS. On either side of Deppomania
we had the stars who were catnip for the kids – Jake Gyllenhaal, Shia
LaBeouf, Kristen Stewart, Rachel McAdams – mixed with the stars, who were
high-fibre for the over-forties: Anthony Hopkins, Michael Keaton, Juliette
Binoche.

The directing lineup was pretty starry
too. In one 48-hour cluster we had Jerzy Skolimowski,
Atom Egoyan, Laurie Anderson – director and
demigoddess of performance art – and Italy’s own once favourite sun,
Marco Bellocchio.

He shone through the darkness of his very own story. SANGUE DEL
MIO SANGUE (BLOOD OF MY BLOOD) begins as a night-hued period drama, narrating
the nasty things done by a Catholic monastery to a young nun suspected of diabolical
possession. The tale was inspired by a real case history known as ‘the nun of
Monza’.
Taking his prologue’s rebellious-outsider hero with it – a handsome thirtyish
blade played by Pier Giorgio Bellocchio, the
director’s son – the film then morphs into a present-day satire on
bureaucracy, government corruption and vampires. These, we are invited to
infer, are the true (or folk-mythic) descendants of Catholic cruelty and
fanaticism.

It’s a dry, dark chortle, this second act. The aged monastery
chief has turned into a modern Dracula, dwelling in a rotting, ruined prison
which used to be, yes, the original monastery. (Bobbio,
the town depicted and for record the town where Bellocchio
runs a small film school, actually did discover
recently the remains of an ancient jail). Antic and envenomed, the movie’s
midsection becomes positively Bulgakovian. Its
diabolical characters – including a Select Committee of vampires and a pack
of local-government bloodsuckers – could have leaped, balletically,
from THE MASTER AND MARGARITA. In a future-set epilogue we return to the
nun’s story. Time, like society and morality, has become topsy-turvy. But the
steely, benighted beauty of Bellocchio’s imagery
remains in place.

Atom Egoyan’s REMEMBER is quickly
forgotten, or should be. Hokey-pokey post-Holocaust thriller/melodrama.
Christopher Plummer primes his skills to play an Alzheimer’s-afflicted
Auschwitz survivor sent on a Nazi-killing mission in modern USA. Less
said, soonest surrendered to oblivion. Skolimowski’s
11 MINUTES – 81 actually, but interweaving simultaneous human
fragment-episodes that lead to a ‘big event’ in a city centre – is gizmo-idea
large on ingenuity, slim on human interest.

Citizen
Canine

But Laurie Anderson’s HEART OF A DOG has a heart the size of a
Baskerville hound and a mind that, for all its basket-case moments (quotes
from Wittgenstein and the Tibetan Book of the Dead), sustains an
essay-documentary for 75 minutes that feel like – well, no more than 75 minutes.

Anderson lost her rat terrier Lolabelle
and this is a valediction forbidding mourning. She wants us to love the world
as her dog did, who after losing her sight was encouraged to paint, sculpt
and play the piano. No, really. We see her do it. Lolabelle
may not have been Artur Rubinstein, but she could
bang out a good second-inversion B major chord.

Around the dog stuff Anderson’s overvoice, clipped yet wonderstruck, muses on life, love,
death and America
after 9/11. People began looking up at the skies in expectant fear just as Lolabelle did (during a post-twin-towers Californian
getaway) after being swooped towards by hawks who fancied, till they got
closer, this white, diminutive, gambolling dot. The film’s visuals are
playful and inventive throughout. Slo-mo, speedy,
sometimes surrealised. One vari-themed
sequence is uniformly coloured an enigmatic, parchmentish
yellow. This is finally revealed as the prevailing background tone in a
favourite Anderson
painting. A Goya landscape with, yes, a dog.

The Venice Golden Lion is a different kind of animal. It doesn’t
play the piano and isn’t bothered by birds of prey. It places its paw,
annually and gigantically, on films and filmmakers. It likes a bit of rough.
Size sometimes does matter. So a lot of bookies clustered, late
in the festival, around China’s
BEHEMOTH – among other punters’ favourites – which showed on the
competition’s penultimate evening.

The
Magnificent Anthracites

Do we call it a documentary? Did we call FRANCOFONIA a
documentary? What is a documentary?
Vaguely inspired by Dante – well, who isn’t? – Liang Zhao’s non-narrative
knockout is about a mining area in Mongolia. To say this gigantic
human footstep has despoiled the landscape is like saying murder despoils a
murder victim’s life. An area the size of a small Chinese province has been
terraced with devastation: the gift of strip-mining. The view we get in some
scenes, from a distant grazing field for sheep, shows the dust-monster
vehicles trundling to and fro in this grey-black Purgatory, under a drifting,
changeless pall of dust and smoke.

As for Hell, that’s underground: in the caverns measureless to man
but measurable to medical science since a good number of miners get
pneumoconiosis. Hell turns to Inferno two-thirds through the film when the
whole screen suddenly turns scorching red. That’s the intro shock to the
smelting sequence, which is astounding. Fire roars and licks. Blackened
hominids we deduce to be human beings tug and hoick giant lumps of solidified
flame from lakes of crimson lava. Like morsels of bloody meat from a stew.

Finally comes Heaven, sky-blue with irony, since it takes the form
of a tour of one of China’s
‘ghost cities’. In these bristling high-rise landscapes, under unspoiled
skies, people are not absent after depopulation but absent because they
haven’t yet arrived. The town we see here is like Las Vegas before the land rush. Steepling, highly-coloured apartment blocks – about fifty
of them – form the domino skyline. If one fell over, they all would. In a
perfect shot that doesn’t even seem staged a street-sweeper, the lone advance
guard of civilisation, scampers quietly across a road to catch a tumbleweed.

The riches from vandalised nature created this useless, or
use-awaiting, paradise. It makes the consummating coda to a dazzling film.
Before it, Liang has wowed us with wonders and horrors effective because he
barely inflects them. This is how it is. The film weakens only when he tries
to poeticise. Did we need the actual quotations from Dante, murmured over the
few and only trick visuals. In these, mountain landscapes are kaleidoscoped into trompe
l’oeil intersecting planes, amid whose visionary cubism we spy, almost
concealed, a naked man’s foetal, recumbent back. This must be Dante musing on
his reincarnated cosmos. Or possibly just Liang Zhao lining up the next shot
of his al fresco Hades.

It was a short rush from BEHEMOTH’s last-day screening to the
prizes gala. Lights, cameras, action, in and around the Palazzo del Cinema.
This year, as in recent ones, the red carpet matched the exoskeletal décor:
multitudinous scarlet shields, like armadillo armour-plating, bearing the
bold device ‘Jaeger-LeCoultre’. That company must
be tickled pink, or scarlet, to have the Mostra del
Cinema sponsorship contract year after year. I’m not complaining (though I
didn’t get my usual envelope). But what happened to the epoch when production
designer Dante Ferretti, il maestro di tutti maestri (Fellini, Scorsese), created the
celebratory palace façade, a new one each season?

The
Immortal Glory

Inside the palazzo,
surprises lay in store. They weren’t just the supporting awards. Best Actor
to Fabrice Luchini, for some dapper sparkle in the
French court drama L’HERMINE (ERMINE): didn’t quite expect that, nor Best
Actress to Valeria Golino, not overly stretched in Italy’s PER
AMOR VOSTRO (FOR YOUR LOVE). Teenaged Abraham Attah,
expressive and moving as an African child soldier in BEASTS OF NO NATION, got
a deserved cheer for winning Best Young Actor. The modestly accomplished
L’HERMINE came again for Best Screenplay, won by writer-director Christian
Vincent.

Then we got two loud cheers in succession. Pablo Trapero was right on the money, my money anyway, for Best
Director with EL CLAN. And ANOMALISA – hooray – got the runner-up Grand Jury
Prize.

Then came the thunderbolt. Out of a clear ceiling. “The Leone d’Oro is won by –(two semi-audible foreign words)…” Hold on, we didn’t quite catch
that? Once again, please? The title?

Jury chief Alfonso Cuaron didn’t
actually say, did he, DESDE ALLA (FROM AFAR). He did? The Venezuelan gay
drama? Commotion, disbelief, pleasure at the unexpected, shock at the
unimaginable. Has a horse this dark ever won a glittering film festival top
prize before, in the history of the international movie olympics?

Fact is, we critics were all wrong. (Except me). In a collective
reviewers’ poll on the last day, Lorenzo Vigas’s
film had come next to bottom. That’s unfair. But it still seemed
inconceivable that a jury could up-rate its value to leonine gold.

Well, hurrah for their nerve. Hurrah for an outsider film from an
outsider continent. Latin America had never
won a Golden Lion before. And hurrah for Venice, which always produces the
unexpected – especially when you least expect it.

Venezia 2016? I’m game if you are.

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH
THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD
CINEMA.